NAVAL DRONES

Intercepting and boarding ships for inspection is one of the most common naval missions. These operations are called VBSS, or Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure in naval parlance, and used to enforce sanctions, disrupt illicit smuggling, and impose blockades in wartime.  In the United States, all of the maritime services - Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard - have some form of VBSS teams. VBSS operations range from routine health and safety inspections to high freeboard opposed boardings, the latter category generally conducted by Naval Special Warfare forces.  In any event, even routine vessel inspections can be dangerous. Robotics technology shows potential to mitigate some of the dangers of VBSS. One of the riskiest aspects of any boarding operation is simply getting onto the ship.  A vessel's freeboard is the distance from the water up to the main deck level, which is where most teams will embark. On some ships or smaller indigenous craft such as dhows, a boarding ...

By Alex Calvo The World Economic Forum in Davos is always a good source of headlines. This year, media interest went beyond financial and economic issues, extending to the ultimate impact of robots on the future of humankind. In a five-member panel , Stuart Russell, a world leading expert on AI (artificial intelligence) and robotics, predicted that AI would overtake humans “ within my children's lifetime ”, adding that it was imperative to ensure that computers kept serving human needs, rather than being instead a threat to our species. In order to do so, Professor Russell believes that it is necessary to guarantee that robots have the same values as we humans. Assuming that AI and robotics will keep progressing, and there is no reason to doubt they will, it is clear that sooner or later we will face the prospect of machines which are more intelligent than their creators. Furthermore, this may also result in they being self-aware. Once they enjoy this dual characteristic ...

Editor's note: Reprinted with permission from the Naval Postgraduate School's  CRUSER News . By Frederick E. Gaghan, Director of Program Development, Applied Research Associates  Inc.  The near-shore environment is one of the most dynamic and technically challenging for both man and machine. Significant research efforts have been conducted to investigate sea-floor crawling robots, but they usually involve “water-proofing” a standard ground robot and attempting to operate it underwater. These designs often experience difficulties in maintaining positional accuracy or operability due to the water flow and wave action. Over the course of several months, ARA studied two key engineering concepts for the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) that directly affect the ability of a robotic system to operate in the surf-zone (SZ); 1) platform hull shape and, 2) propulsion. To address platform shape a study was completed of a horseshoe crab’s c...

Editor's Note: Operating a warship -- or any large vessel, for that matter -- is a very manpower intensive endeavor.  Although automation has improved engineering in particular, the basic functions of operating, maintaining, and cleaning a ship have remain relatively unchanged since steam replaced sail as a source of power.  Pile on training and war-fighting functions, and today's combatants require tireless efforts by their over-taxed crews, which have been reduced in the past decade for the sake of cost savings.    The blog has discussed numerous air, surface, and undersea unmanned technologies that have begun to make their mark on naval operations.  The impact on robotics on naval technologies is not limited solely to vehicles. Here, LT Scott Cheney-Peters discusses a robotic technology that may assist future sailors with logistics management: If you haven’t spent much time aboard a naval v...

Robots are frequently advertised as designed to perform jobs that are too dangerous, dirty, or boring for humans to accomplish.  Unmanned naval systems have also often been touted as a way to reduce the most expensive component of a Navy's budget - manpower - arguably a claim that has been hard to prove with some platforms.  However, an ongoing U.S. Navy robotics program might actually live up to both of these expectations.   Under a program initiated by the Office of Naval Research in 2009, SeaRobotics has delivered the latest variant of the  HullBUG (Hull Bio-inspired [formerly bio-memetic] Underwater Grooming)robot cleaner for  testing at ONR's Port Canaveral Large Scale Seawater Facility before the system moves into production.  HullBUG will autonomously remove the bio-fouling such as algae and barnacles that grow on ship's hulls.  Previous versions of HullBUG were tested on frigates at N...